Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on several hard drives concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, still what is common between them is that they all function as a single unit where information is saved. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the info on all the drives is the same at all times, so even in case some drive fails for some reason, the information will still be available on the other drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well because the reading and writing processes could be split between different drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance may differ according to the particular setup - whether your data is written on all drives real-time or it's written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Web Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information stored on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the malfunctioning one, the information which will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives along with the data from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the bits of every file adequately and to confirm the integrity of the info duplicated on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the content you upload to your web hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for every single file on all drives in real time.